Author Milan Sime Martinic has published an extraordinary book, "Ironway: Watching over Benjamin Hill" on how the destruction and American wars in Central America ended lives, broke futures and created the migration to the United States that continues today.The book relates how guerillas from one side or another (Communists or US-backed paramilitary) rode into villages and shot all the men and troublesome women, not to die but to lay dying so as to avoid the stench while they ransacked their homes and used the younger women. If you can call the surviving children the lucky ones, their luck went straight through Hell, and rode northward on the back of the demon they call "La Bestia," Mexico's cargo train that carries tens of thousands of migrants on its back and between cars to their deaths, to unimaginable suffering and heartbreak, and to a lucky few, to cross into the United States.But luck is not always good. Bad luck is real, and it is also luck. Along the journey and even at its end, women have it the hardest. From frequent rape and use of their bodies as currency to buy themselves and their groups out of trouble or for protection or affection, to abuse, rape again, and violent rape again, to kidnapping, human trafficking, murder, and sexual slavery.But they are lucky to be alive. Out of the 250,000+ people each year who embark on the journey in search of a life in the United States, 85 percent of them succumb to constant setbacks, arrests, abuse by police, by gangs, even by those traveling with them; for many, there is only death, slavery, abuse, and many just plain disappear, never reaching the border. The shadowy world that engulfs those who try is vividly described in "Ironway." The novel cobbles together the stories of hundreds of people interviewed by the author and whose story is the true story behind the amazing tales full of despair and hope, of heartbreak and bursts of unjustified joy, of a journey full of precarious days between extraordinary acts of heroism and cowardice, of betrayal and loyalty, of cruelty and redeeming kindness.The male protagonist descends into a life of street gangs which he joined for protection and which gave him an identity and a way of life, a life of crime, of violence and of death. From an early age, the son of a prominent Salvadorian political family is orphaned as his parents are killed in the proxy war between the US and the Soviet Union in Central America. He is 6 years old and is driven to the streets where he has to commit crimes to survive, where gangs rule and he attacks and is attacked, where from that early age he uses people and is used. He has to run from there in order to save his life. His direction: The path of thousands of former guerillas and defeated soldiers to the land that promised freedom to the brave who fought on its behalf and their families. He and a cousin team up with two Honduran women and cross Mexico on La Bestia, a moving Hell that forges demons out of people and souls. Robberies, rapes, murders, drugs, gangs, and more take their turn at attacking the foursome. At Nogales the men and women split, the women are kidnapped by Yakuza trafficking gangs and made into forced sex workers in the LA underground. The men are arrested and are processed into the crushing US prison system where gangs are a way of protection. Those same gangs control the streets into which they are eventually released. That there is even the possibility of a happy ending in the grip of such sweeping forces is a remarkable testament to the redeeming power of the human spirit. That "Ironway" tells the story of such extraordinary recovery, redemption, and atonement leading to the accomplishments and success, fulfills the whole of human aspirations in the face of adversity.The novel is set against a timeline of world events that affected El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and southern Mexico as the Cold War between the US and the Soviets played its pawns.
